Silly question

[Picstar]

Hello All, I was wondering if the Pic chip capable of processing a video or .jpeg image and making corrections. For instance, line tracking. Can a Pic analyze an image, find the black line and make corrections to the steering of a small robotic vehicle? This may be beyond a Pic chips capabilities, requiring a different processor and sophisticated software, but I just wanted some feedback. I know that there is the CMU-CAM but it requires a pretty good knowledge of Assembly language or C, which I do not have. Thanks!!

[Ioannis]

PIC24 could, PIC32 sure will.

Ioannis

[Jumper]

If it is enough to tell a difference between black and white and only tracking i.e a white line on a black surface it can be done with a PIC18F. But you need to use a normal B&W CCTV camera and use the pic to do timing and comparators to tell if the signal is WHITE or DARK.

The brightness is much higher in signal level than the dark parts so it is not that hard actually. We have used this way to detect a laser point infront of a camera and it is not hard at all and then we could even track the point in both X and Y with a really high accuracy.

There is alot of power in a PIC18 so if you really dont have a need to "see" the image the 18-series is going to do the job.

Jumper

[mackrackit]

find the black line and make corrections to the steering of a small robotic vehicle
If line following is all you want then a couple of IR sensors will do the trick.

[mackrackit]

http://www.parallax.com/tabid/768/ProductID/77/Default.aspx
(http://www.parallax.com/tabid/768/ProductID/77/Default.aspx) Ideas

[sayzer]

with this
6339

http://www.parallax.com/Store/Sensors/ColorLight/tabid/175/CategoryID/50/List/0/SortField/0/Level/a/ProductID/566/Default.aspx

you can do what you asked with 16F628A.

This cam gives you analog output for the surface it is sensing for each pixel (128 pixel).
The pixels are mapped with gray scale 0 - 255.
Since you only need black and white as 1 and 0, you do not need analog feature.
Also, you can see the surface from 10cm above.
It gives you a line of 128-pixels in an array; in your case, 0's and 1's.

With your coding, you can see the line on the surface something like 0000000000111111110000000000.